History of Harlem
In 1664, the English took control of the New Netherland colony, and English colonial Governor Richard Nicolls established the "Harlem Line" as the southern border patent line of the village of Nieuw Haarlem (later, the village of Harlem) running approximately northward between near modern East 74th Street, at the East River, and West 129th Street, on the Hudson River.
[20] The village remained largely rural through the early 19th century and, though the "grid system" of streets, designed downtown, was formally extended to Harlem in 1811, it does not seem that anybody expected it would mean much.
Service connecting the outlays of Harlem with the rest of the City of New York (on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan) was done via steamboat on the East River, an hour-and-a-half passage, sometimes interrupted when the river froze in winter, or else by stagecoach along the Boston Post Road, which descended from McGown's Pass (now in Central Park) and skirted the salt marshes around 110th Street, to pass through Harlem.
[27] The Panic of 1873 caused Harlem property values to drop 80%,[27] and gave the City of New York the opportunity to annex the troubled community as far north as 155th Street.
However, also in that year, the construction glut and a delay in the building of the subway led to a fall in real estate prices which attracted immigrant Eastern Europe Jews and Italians to Harlem in accelerating numbers.
[40] The mass migration of African Americans into the area began in 1904, due to another real estate crash, the worsening of conditions for black people elsewhere in the city, and the leadership of black real estate entrepreneurs including Phillip Payton Jr. After the collapse of the 1890s, new speculation and construction started up again in 1903 and the resulting glut of housing led to a crash in values in 1904 and 1905 that eclipsed the late-19th century slowdown.
[46] The early 20th-century Great Migration of black people to northern industrial cities was fueled by their desire to leave behind the Jim Crow South, seek better jobs and education for their children, and escape a culture of lynching violence.
During World War I, expanding industries recruited black laborers to fill new jobs, thinly staffed after the draft began to take young men.
[49] The expansion was fueled primarily by an influx of black people from the southern U.S. states, especially Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, who took trains up the East Coast.
Between 1907 and 1915,[50] some white residents of Harlem resisted the neighborhood's change, especially once the swelling black population pressed west of Lenox Avenue, which served as an informal color line until the early 1920s.
In May 2011, one of the last remaining Italian retail businesses in the neighborhood, a barbershop owned by Claudio Caponigro on 116th Street, was threatened with closure by a rent increase.
[63] Soapbox speakers drew crowds on Seventh and Lenox Avenues until the 1960s, some offering political oratory, with Hubert Harrison the most famous, while others, particularly in the late 1920s, sold medicine.
[64][65] Harlem also offered a wealth of sporting events: the Lincoln Giants played baseball at Olympic Field at 136th and Fifth Avenue until 1920, after which residents had to travel to the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx; men's and women's basketball teams from local athletic clubs played in church gymnasiums, and, as they became more popular, at the Manhattan Casino on 155th Street, before giving way to professional teams, most famously the Rens, based at the Renaissance Ballroom on Seventh Avenue;[66][67] and boxing bouts took place at the Commonwealth Casino on East 135th Street (run by white promoters the McMahon brothers).
Holstein's role in the community extended further than most of his colleagues, included membership in the Monarch Lodge of the Elks, support for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, philanthropy in his native Virgin Islands, and patronage of the Harlem Renaissance.
With the increase in a poor population, it was also the time when the neighborhood began to deteriorate to a slum, and some of the storied traditions of the Harlem Renaissance were driven by poverty, crime, or other social ills.
The same year saw internationalism in Harlem politics, as Harlemites responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by holding giant rallies, signing petitions and sending an appeal to the League of Nations.
He was easily elected to Congress when a congressional district was placed in Harlem in 1944, leaving his City Council seat to be won by another black Harlemite, Benjamin J. Davis.
Ironically, Harlem's political strength soon deteriorated, as Clayton Powell Jr. spent his time in Washington or his vacation home in Puerto Rico, and Davis was jailed in 1951 for violations of the Smith Act.
As chairman of the House Committee of Education and Labor at the start of the 1960s, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used this position to direct federal funds to various development projects in Harlem.
[95] Typically, existing structures were torn down and replaced with city-designed and managed properties that would, in theory, present a safer and more pleasant environment than those available from private landlords.
In the aftermath of the riots, the federal government funded a pilot program called Project Uplift, in which thousands of young people in Harlem were given jobs during the summer of 1965.
Speaking at a rally of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Max Stanford, a Black Panther, declared that the United States "could be brought down to its knees with a rag and some gasoline and a bottle.
[117][118] The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle-class blacks left for the outer boroughs (primarily the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs.
[22] Tenants were sometimes to blame; some would strip wiring and fixtures from their buildings to sell, throw garbage in hallways and airshafts, or otherwise damage the properties which they lived in or visited.
For example, the federal government's Model Cities Program spent $100 million on job training, health care, education, public safety, sanitation, housing, and other projects over a ten-year period, Harlem showed no improvement.
[126] This article shows the ravine between white institutions and the Black community, often filled with ambiguity and racially charged justifications for socially approved negative judgments on and of the latter.
[126] The neighborhood no longer had a functioning economy; stores were shuttered and by estimates published in 1971, 60% of the area's economic life depended on the cash flow from the illegal "Numbers game" alone.
In a community with one of the highest crime rates in the city, garbage-strewn vacant lots and tumbledown tenements, many of them abandoned and sealed, contribute to the sense of danger and desolation that pervades much of the area.
[49][136] From 1987 through 1990, the city removed long-unused trolley tracks from 125th Street, laid new water mains and sewers, installed new sidewalks, curbs, traffic lights, streetlights, and planted trees.
This was driven by changing federal and city policies, including fierce crime fighting and a concerted effort to develop the retail corridor on 125th Street.
